[LINK] Myki turned on .. sort of...

[Tom Worthington]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> ... no integrated system yet. ...
> While ticket validators on train stations have worked well ...

Ticket validation for railway stations are much easier to get to work 
than for buses or trams. The machines are on the platform which makes 
the engineering easier, but more importantly passengers can validate 
their ticket while waiting for the train. With a bus or tram it is much 
more time critical as you have to do it on the vehicle. If the MyKi 
system is going to work anywhere it will be on the trains.

For this reason Istanbul has ticket barriers for its modern trams (more 
technically these are "light rail" vehicles. You pay at the barrier and 
then wait on the platform for the tram. On the smaller tourist trams the 
readers is on the tram itself.

> ... continuing problems getting the machines to
>  ****transmit data reliably from trams and buses to the central
> database.*****

I doubt any competent ICT professional would design a transport 
ticketing system which relied on transmitting data from trams and buses 
in real time. Such a system would be fundamentally flawed.

> I have a MYKI card and I can't log into my account. "Site under
> maintenance" message.   ...

I did a few checks on the MiKi home page <http://www.myki.com.au/>:

* The W3C Markup Validation Service reported 47 Errors and 65 warnings: 
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myki.com.au%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0>.

* The W3C mobileOK Checker reported "This page is not mobile-friendly!": 
<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=2009123001275561&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myki.com.au%2F">

* The TAW automated accessibility test reported 4 Level One, 30 Level 
Two and 29 Level Three problems: <http://www.tawdis.net/tawdis/online>.

These would tend to make the web site less responsive and usable.

The accessibility problems are of particular concern. The web site says:

"We make every reasonable effort to ensure that this website reaches 
level AA conformance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content 
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG), and conforms to the Victorian 
Government's Accessibility Standard." 
<http://www.myki.com.au/Home/Accessibility/Accessibility/default.aspx>.

This statement is clearly false (even this page with the accessibility 
claim on it had dozens of accessibility problems). A reasonable effort 
has not been made and the web site does not meet level double-A of the 
W3C Accssbility Guidelines. On the face of it the Victorian Government 
is in breech of federal anti-discrimination legislation.

As an example the home page says: "Click the 'BUY' button below to take 
advantage of the FREE registered myki offer." The image below says 
"Buy", but the ALT text for the image does not say "Buy" it says "Get 
myki". This is very likely to confuse any user of the system who can't 
see the image because they are blind, cannot easily identify what is 
"below" for the same reason and so would not be able to find a "buy" 
button. This very obvious problem should have been picked up, if even 
the most minimal accessibility testing had been done.

> I have a MYKI card and I can't log into my account.

Yes. The "buy" page took more than a minute to respond when I tried it.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274